


Discover your Soul

by tisfan



Series: MCU Kink Bingo [45]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Blood, Fix-It, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Red String of Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 06:03:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15924386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tisfan/pseuds/tisfan
Summary: Magic exists. Ask anyone with a soul mate string and they’ll tell you.Curses exist, too.





	Discover your Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Square Filled: I3 -- Character is a Soldier

_Before you find your soul mate, you must first discover your soul. – Charles F. Glassman_

Magic exists.

Ask anyone with a soul mate string and they’ll tell you. Magic moved the world to give them their perfect match, their mate, the person for whom they will live and die, the person that completes them and fills them up with love.

Curses exist, too.

Ask Maria Stark, whose only son was brought in to the world, barely breathing. Anthony Edward Stark almost died in his first few minutes, choking and spluttering. He uttered one mournful wail, not a baby’s indignation of leaving the womb and entering the cold, cruel world, but an old soul’s dismay.

His string, bound to him as such things were, was broken.

Less than a foot below his hand, his string ended in a puff of broken threads.

And it was bleeding.

No one had ever seen such a thing before. On the rare, and tragic states of soulmates having died before they could meet, the string was still there, indicating the broken bond, but it was black and ashy. The remaining partner would wrap it around their finger as they aged and it would slowly shrivel up and die. In some cases, a new string formed later, as their mate was reborn in a younger body.

This one, Tony’s string, bleed. Constantly, at first.

The hospital kept the baby in the infant care ward for almost a month. The blood loss affected the baby; he was weak and small and didn’t cry.

Eventually, they let him go home with his parents.

The wound clotted, but it never closed, never scarred over. The string remained brilliant red, tracing the line from the heart directly out through his finger, just like it was supposed to. It didn’t always bleed, as he got older, but if he was sad, or upset, sometimes the cut would reopen and he’d find himself with blood on his jeans, or on his desk, or eventually in his workshop.

Tony never took very good care of his hands. What was the point? People always looked at him, looked down at that loose, dangling thread, and viewed him as some sort of pariah.

Someone, maybe, whose soulmate had rejected him, sight unseen? No one knew, and the speculation was wild and varied.

Hard to maintain friendships, when people wondered. Harder, when his father was ashamed of the bleeding string, and the fact that everyone knew about it.

Tony decided he didn’t care and he made friends with the robots he built from kits and from people he met on the internet, where no one knew about his famous father or his infamous bleeding soul string.

The first time he kissed a classmate, the string practically hemorrhaged, spraying the unfortunate crush with blood.

Tony didn’t get a lot of kisses, after that story spread around.

He changed schools constantly to get away from rumors and speculations.

It didn’t help.

The first person he met who didn’t care was an upperclassman, his first year at MIT, named James Rhodes.

Rhodes and Tony.

Who became Rhodey and Tones, swapping the last letters of their names in an affectionate gesture that warmed Tony profoundly. He’d never really known the affection of friends, so he cherished the one he’d made.

The string never bled when Rhodey was around, either.

“Maybe something’s just wrong with your mate,” Rhodey speculated, and his speculation wasn’t cruel or unkind, just curious. And in some manner, reassuring. “Maybe they’re sick, or they get hurt a lot. It ain’t like this sort of thing is well studied, or nothin’. It’s all about faith and fate, and those things don’t hold up under a microscope.”

Tony wondered what his string looked like under a microscope.

Nothing, as it turned out. The string didn’t exist in the same time/space as things like photography and microanalysis, and Tony ended up getting a second master’s thesis out of speculative fate physics, while he was putting in the effort for mechanical engineering anyway.

Tony combined the two projects for his first doctorate, theoretical fate physics, and actually invented an entirely new manner of photogenesis that captured the essences of fate strings. Just after his nineteenth birthday, Tony made the front cover of Time magazine for the first verifiable picture of a fate string.

He looked, he decided, like a baby in the picture and he started frantically cultivating a beard.

Beards were wise, right? Inscrutable. Certainly not an object of pity.

Also, hot. Beards were hot.

***

Later, much, much later, Tony will remember the only time his fate string didn’t _hurt_. It wasn’t a bad pain so much as just a constant ache. If he wasn’t paying attention, he’d find himself rubbing at his finger, massaging the joint. He stopped doing that after he developed a flesh colored band to hide the string and control the bleeding.

Mostly.

And then, not quite a week before Christmas, his hand stopped hurting.

He didn’t know what to do with that information. It had never not ached before. Sometimes he could ignore it, but whenever he was paying attention, the pain was right there.

And suddenly it wasn’t.

He ripped the band off to study the pathetic length of psychic ribbon. It was throbbing; the end curling like a snake. Twitching.

The end swelled, like it was filling with blood, and then dropped, added another ten, twelve, inches to the length, until it was resting on the ground, straining.

What the hell?

He watched it, fascinated. Petted the string, poked at it. Took a photograph with his special camera.

Four hours later, the police came to tell him his parents were dead.

Six hours after that, the string bled feverishly, a stomach-turning spray of arterial blood. Tony cleaned it up, wrapped his finger. Pretended it hadn’t happened.

What the hell was a mate supposed to do for him now, anyway?

Coincidence, he told himself with a shiver.

Mourning, terrified, alone, he deleted the picture.

***

The Soldier sat in the chair.

He didn’t struggle. He never struggled anymore.

The string was wrapped around his wrist, several times. It had leaked out of the metal arm shortly after the Soldier had been awakened from cryo.

He didn’t try to hide it. He never tried to hide things anymore.

“Good job, soldier,” his handler said.

The soldier didn’t answer, he just waited.

“Keep him up a few weeks, I want him around for the testing.”

“You got it, sir,” one of the techs said.

“And cauterize that thing, before it bleeds everywhere.”

There was pain, when they burned the string. There was always pain. But the Soldier didn’t care about that.

***

Tony’s string started growing again, in the year after the Fall of SHIELD.

He couldn’t figure out why.

His own ground breaking research aside, no one still really studied the fate threads, or soul mates, or the properties therin. He was, his critics said sometimes, killing the magic.

“Magic that can’t withstand a little examination might deserve to be killed,” he snarled in response to that.

It still didn’t lead to another person, trailing along behind him for several yards like a sad kite. Useless, and he was tripping over it. There was, however, too much on Iron Man’s docket for him to actually get really into detail with his soul string. He wrapped it tightly around his wrist and ignored it as best he could.

First, arrangements had to be made for world security. Without SHIELD, without Nick Fury, there was a lot of burdens falling around, uncaught.

Then there was Ultron.

And Sokovia.

And…

The string kept growing. Twined around Tony’s wrist, up to his elbow, he ended up bundling it around his chest just to keep it out of the way.

Why was it so damn disorderly, too? Other people’s strings sort of melted away into some ethereal plane when they weren’t directly connected to the soulmate. They didn’t tumble all over the floor like a sulky yo-yo.

In fact, most people’s strings were well nigh invisible unless the person was within grabbing distance of their mates. Or, at least, from an outsider’s appearance. For each individual, they could see their string, winding off into the distance, in the direction of their other half.

Nice thought, Tony snorted, tucking an extra bit of loop into his pocket.

Secretary Ross was breathing down Tony’s neck and while he was beginning to wonder if he could, actually, strangle the man to death it it, he decided not to risk it. Not today.

“Of course you can quote me,” Tony raged into the phone. “I’m saying it, aren’t I? There will be consequences.”

God damn it, Steve.

That had been a refrain for a while now, and Tony was tired of it.

Having to send out his best friend to arrest his old man’s best friend? Officially, Tony didn’t have anything like that sort of authority, which is why Rhodey was doing it. And because Tony really, really didn’t want to arrest Steve. Things were going to shit without it.

There was something oddly compelling about the video feed.

Cap’s old friend, Barnes, having done a stint in the Russian military, or whatever. Gorgeous, sulky, long tangled hair and unshaven face, he stared up at the hidden camera like he knew it was there.

“This is what I was saying about making it worse, Steve,” Nat was complaining to Cap as they were being processed.

“At least he’s alive,” Steve said, staring back at his old friend. “What’s going to happen to him now?”

“We’ll get him help, of course,” Tony said, because that was only fair. “He’s… uh. He’s bleeding.”

There was a wet, smacking sound from under Tony’s clothing, like he’d stepped on a ziplock bag and blown the seal.

A rush of heat and wet seeped down his side.

_Son of a bitch, so am I._

Tony bunched his fist up, as if he could stop his fate string from bleeding from sheer force of will. Why now, he wondered. Totally, epically bad timing.

The string was squirming, writhing, wriggling against him like it was trying to get away.

Barnes’ gaze went from the camera, over to where he couldn’t possibly see Tony trying to tip his body away so that no one noticed the wet spot on his pants, or the way blood was gushing into his shoe.

_Fuck. I need to get out of here._

“I need to get out of here,” Barnes echoed, his voice a dark tremor against the air. Tony whirled, took a few steps, heedless of the bloody footprint he was leaving behind.

Look at him, trapped like an animal, Tony thought, his chest squeezing in sudden sympathy. Barnes wasn’t struggling with the restraints, but he was leaning in Tony’s direction, like steel drawn to a powerful magnet.

“Trapped, like an animal,” Barnes agreed.

_Can you hear me?_

There was blood pooling at the base of the restraint room, brilliant and red. Someone should die from that much blood loss.

“I hear you.”

_Holy fuck._

“Stark, what are you doing--”

Tony took another few steps, then another, and his string unraveled from his belly, slithered out from under the hem of his shirt.

Touched that pool of blood under Barnes.

The world exploded in light.

***

The Soldier was on guard.

No one had told him that, no one had given him orders. They didn’t need to. He knew it, bone deep, blood deep.

The puddle had turned into coils and coils of string, tangling between him and the man. From the line in his heart, through the artificial arm, down his wires and servos, out the finger, and into knots and tangles, draped all over him, and then reaching for… _Tony._

He’d broken out of the holding cell; nothing like that could contain him for long unless he wanted to be contained. Tony, Tony, Tony. Tony was clinging to him, sobbing with broken-hearted relief.

The Soldier knew something about that, too.

“What’s going to happen now?”

That was Steve. The Soldier knew him. A little.

Not like he knew the sobbing man in his arms. That song, he’d been denied well and too long.

Tony wiped his face, presenting his red rimmed eyes unashamed.

“I expect I’m going to be writing a new paper of fate strings physics,” Tony said.

“I meant, to Bucky.”

The Soldier bared his teeth at that name; Bucky came with knives and poisons. That name was pain. It wasn’t… safe to say.

_Bucky?_ Tony’s voice was in his head.

It was. Who he was.

“We’ll figure it out, Cap,” Tony said. “By the book.”

“I don’t think you’re gonna like that book, Tony,” Steve said.

“Well, I’ve rewritten the book before,” Tony said. “With less solid information to go on. So… sit back, and watch me work. Don’t worry. I’ll…”

Tony stared at Bucky, his entire heart in his eyes. “I’ll take care of him.”

“And what about you?”

Bucky didn’t have to say anything. He pulled Tony closer and glared. Unarmed, held at gunpoint, the Soldier radiated threat and everyone took a hesitant step back. Message received.

“I think we got it, snowflake,” Tony said. “You can just… relax now. We’re going to fix this mess.”

“I know.”

 


End file.
